Talk about class act! A Pennsylvania man has filed a class action lawsuit against retailer Best Buy, claiming the company hasn’t paid employees overtime for the time the employees spend waiting to be searched at the end of their shift. The lawsuit also says Best Buy makes employees work through their meal breaks without compensation. According to the lawsuit, employees must frequently wait up to 15 minutes to be frisked, presumably for merchandise they’re trying to smuggle out of the store as they clock off-duty. It’s not clear if the amount of missing overtime is equal to the value of the merchandise that the searches might have turned up. I can only wonder if the front door smuggling problem is that severe that you need to body search employees? Would it make sense to spend a little more on screening procedures when you originally hire the people?

At first all the iPhone class-action lawsuits seemed like the usual attempts by attorneys to generate revenue from a company whose stock is going north. There is an entire business devoted to picking a “thing” about a product, finding a suitable class-action representative, and filing against a company. But there’s a pattern. How many class-action lawsuits have been filed against carriers and handset makers before Apple came into the market? How many headlines have you read about “monopoly” or “locked” or “third-party applications?” Well, I’ve seen none. No one has complained that you can’t use your Sidekick on a network other than T-Mobile. So, it’s gotta be about Apple. And that’s what makes me wonder if these lawsuits are somehow supported or even instigated by rival carriers who can’t fight back with a competitive product. Verizon especially has been adept at using political action companies to create grassroots efforts against certain FCC spectrum actions. Well, call me a cynic.

A few months back I noticed that certain graphics within the Tivo DVR screens had been changed to imitate Apple TV’s smooth-looking screens. Actually, it was more than imitation. It was the very same glossy button-type effect that Apple uses. Now Tivo has downloaded the latest service upgrade and… everything looks like Apple TV now. The colors indicating the status of each recorded program have been changed–they’re a little more chalky or pastel-like. The play-record progress bar is now three-dimensional, with a glossy finish. The rest of the screens all have a three-dimension look to them and seem much more polished than the previous flat colors. They could have saved themselves a lot of work–they should have sold the company to Apple.

OK, you buy an iPhone, you use it according to its hardware and software capabilities, and you’re happy. Unless you want to take the phone apart and re-solder components, or download software to it using techniques devised by non-Apple programmers. If you do that, should you expect that your iPhone would continue to work exactly as Apple originally gave it to you? Apple’s Phil Schiller has said that Apple is not specifically devising its software updates to block hacked phones. Instead, the company’s warnings are meant to let iPhone owners know that some tiny bit of programming they include in an update might break third-party apps. I take Phil at his word. So, if you modify your iPhone, and it later doesn’t work, you’re on your own. I loathe making analogies, but… if you put a Chevy engine in a Ford, do you complain to Chevy when Ford changes something? Should you expect Weber to fix your barbeque grill after you’ve converted it from charcoal to gas? It has nothing to do with Apple or Steve Jobs. It’s just the way products work. You modify, you take responsibility. P.S.–I’d also point out that it’s still very early in the product cycle to start complaining. I’m sure Steve will loosen up the restrictions on using other software at some point, although alternate carrier hacking will continue to be a no-no.

Palm has introduced what they hope will be a break-through mobile device called the Centro, combining a cellular phone, QWERTY keyboard, 1.3 Mp camera, 320×320 screen, all in rounded form factor colored black or bright red. But take a look at some photos of the device, showing how clunky it is, and how crummy the on-screen, Palm-based fonts and graphics are. The connection dock at the bottom of the device alone sticks out and takes up space. On the other hand, Palm is pushing this device out the door for $99 each, so maybe people will overlook the design and construction for the price. The handset will be available from Sprint/Nextel using—owwww!—their 3G network. As for my iPhone, after a month of use it’s definitely become a focal point for my communications. I’m still learning new features, adjusting settings and adding information to the calendar and contacts modules. Couldn’t live without it!

Dell Inc. announced that it will open a retail store in Moscow (Russia) in early October that will sell exclusively Dell-branded merchandise. The company has had kiosk retail locations for several years, and has flirted with the full retail store concept, opening a handful of complete stores at various malls last year. But earlier this year the company announced that its plans for a New York City store had been cancelled. In Moscow, the store will be on the second floor of the new Gorbuskin Dvor retail center, and managed by Nexus, a Dell partner. CEO Michael Dell noted that Internet use has grown 800% in Russia over the past 7 years, a figure that doesn’t seem that impressive over such a long period of time. A company press release noted, “The Moscow store is the latest in Dell’s plans to reach more customers globally through partnerships with retailers.”

After using my iPhone for about 3 weeks, I really like it. Of course, the user interface is fantastic, and its capabilities fit right in with what I need: on the road e-mail, browsing and chat (OK, it’s SMS). The EDGE speed seems adequate to me. The browser is pretty interesting–when you double-tap the screen to enlarge a page, it seeks out the width of any columns on the page and centers the enlargement on it. And when you flick down the page, the page doesn’t move left or right, but simply flies upward, following the column. There appears no way to manually open a Web page in a new window, and too bad there isn’t more caching (pages seem to reload each time). On the e-mail side, I wish there was a way to mark and delete a bunch of messages at once. I had to get a case for the iPhone, since the sides are so slim and slippery that I was afraid I’d drop it. And I’m still leery of that glass screen. Otherwise, I’m happy.

I just finished reading several score of Apple forum postings about the iPhone and international use. The first traveling iPhone users have found $4,000 phone bills waiting for them when they returned. One person claims to have been cut off mid-month after generating a $41,000 bill! In any event, international use is overly complicated and very expensive, even with AT&T’s monthly international plans (which have a fairly low 20 Mb of data included in the plan). Apparently there are so many cellular carriers involved, so many telecom companies and lots of governments who all want a slice of the revenue. Sorta like calling from a hotel room phone–never do it! We truly live in a global society, and yet cellular is still fractured, complicated and expensive. Makes you wonder if those rumors of Apple (and Google for sure) bidding on radio spectrum this January have some real merit. Think what a progressive company could do with spectrum! Verizon Wireless certainly has, and they’ve gone to court to stop the FCC from awarding any open spectrum bids. Keep watching the action.

Steve Jobs’ open letter announcing a $100 credit for early iPhone users is full of interesting tidbits. First, he reiterates that the price cut decision was correct, so you can bet that the sales numbers were overwhelming and compelling. Second, his letter is a great example of the word “begrudging.” Jobs explains to buyers about technology being a “bumpy road,” his way of saying, “Sorry, Charlie.” But lastly, he goes on to say all the right words in announcing the $100 credit: trust, apologize, high expectations, valued customers. It’s pretty obvious from the decision and letter that Jobs was listening to other people, instead of making decisions on his own. Fortunately. The result is so much buzz, some good will, a few remaining complainers, and a potential financial hit of no more than $36 million. It also puts more Apple products into the hands of customers, and presumably will also generate some following revenues. So, even the credit can’t be a bad thing.

In an unprecedented move, Apple dropped the price of its top-of-the-line iPhone by $200, and phased out the bottom-end model, all just two months after introducing the product. To say that everyone was surprised would be putting it mildly. In the case of those who purchased the $599 model, it might be more that surprise….like annoyance. Apple usually lowers prices only by introducing more full-featured models of the same device, and certainly doesn’t do it so quickly. So how come? To take such a bold move, the sales data must have been staggeringly overwhelming (pardon the grammar). At launch, some analysts were saying that first day iPhone sales would total 1 million devices. Turns out they sold 270,000 that first weekend. Now they’re on track to sell 1 million by the end of September. Those numbers are certainly positive, but they must have been a wake-up call for Apple, especially the share between the top and bottom iPhone models. So their choice was to keep models and prices the same, or bite the bullet and make the change. Boy did they bite the bullet on this one. [Read Steve Jobs' take on this price cut.]

These days it seems that every company feels they have to be in every market. Microsoft especially feels like it has to be the master of every product associated with technology: computers, games, search, operating systems, etc. So kudos to Palm CEO Ed Colligan for recognizing that the company’s Foleo project was stretching the company a little too far–they killed the project just four months after it was first publicly introduced. Colligon wrote on his personal blog, “Our own evaluation and early market feedback were telling us that we still have a number of improvements to make Foleo a world-class product, and we cannot afford to make those improvements on a platform that is not central to our core focus.” Wow! Pretty unusual in the tech world. Recognizing your limitations. Now if every company did that, we’d probably have fewer crappy products.

When it comes to Internet connection speeds, you can’t be too fast–or can you? The Gigaom Web site has posted an interview with a Verizon engineer who is testing 100 Mbps service at his home, much faster than the typical 1-8 Mbps service you get from cable or DSL. So is his life one big speedy experience? Ah, turns out no. In an e-mail interview, the Verizon engineer says that today’s servers are optimized for the network. Actually, make that “limited.” No one is putting 100 Mbps server capability into their data centers, because no one can receive data at that speed. The engineer says his on-line experience is nearly the same as using an 8 Mbps connection, even with streaming video and other high-bandwidth media. And that doesn’t take into consideration server congestion and other ways that servers can be slowed down. The Internet pipe is only as fast as the servers to which it connects, it turns out. On the other hand, it would be great to brag about having 100 Mbps!